Sergio Henao out of Sky team

The Guardian have just reported that one of their riders, Sergio Henao, will not participate in any races for 8 weeks, following concerns over his out-of-competition testing and the results. Sky have proactively flagged their concern to the UCI and asked for help in understanding (and interpreting) the results.

It’s reassuring to now see teams taking such a public stance on these sort of questions, following years of ‘smoke and mirrors’ with previous teams and governing bodies. While the cynic in me is saying that Sky are playing a neat PR agenda here and that there’s actually a very different agenda hidden somewhere, I really want to believe that cycling has made a significant leap forward in the battle against dopers. I really hope that Sky have flagged this now to not only help Sergio to keep on the straight and narrow, and avoid any misunderstandings over his training regime (which must be punishing), but to also signal to all other teams that they need to start working differently in the way that they manage riders, training, fans, etc.